Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe, The: Graves of His Family, Friends and Foes

By Sharon Pajka

Journey to the burial places of the people who lived in Poe's world.
Edgar Allan Poe considered himself a Virginian. Credited with originating the modern detective story, developing Gothic horror tales, and writing the precursor to science fiction, Poe worked to elevate Southern literature. He lived in the South most of his life, died in Baltimore and made his final home in Richmond. His family and many of his closest associates were southerners. Visit the graves of the people with whom he worked and socialized, who he loved and at times loathed and gain a fuller understanding of Poe's life. These were individuals who supported, inspired, and challenged him, and even a few who attempted to foil his plans. Professor and cemetery historian Sharon Pajka tells their stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781439678800

Sharon Pajka

Sharon Pajka, PhD, is a professor of English at Gallaudet University. She is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Gallaudet University and the University of Virginia. She has a certificate in public history from the University of Richmond. On the weekends, find her in the cemetery giving history tours or volunteering, as well as running River City Cemetarians.

Book preview

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.com

Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Pajka

All rights reserved

First published 2023

E-Book edition 2023

ISBN 978.1.43967.880.0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934829

Print Edition ISBN 978.1.46715.454.3

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is dedicated to all who have helped tell the story of Edgar Allan Poe and his writing and to my father, Martin Pajka, for clipping all those news articles for me.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Cemeteries by State

1. Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe (1787–1811)

Saint John’s Episcopal Churchyard, Richmond, Virginia

2. Frances Keeling Valentine Allan (1784–1829)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

3. John Allan (1779–1834)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

4. Anne Moore Valentine (1785–1850)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

5. Edward Valentine (1794–1878)

Buchanan Episcopal Cemetery, Botetourt County, Virginia

6. William Galt (1755–1825)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

7. William Henry Leonard Poe (1807–1831)

Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore, Maryland

8. David Poe Sr. (1743–1816)

Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore, Maryland

9. Robert Craig Stanard (1814–1857)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

10. Jane Stith Craig Stanard (1790–1824)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

11. Robert Matthew Sully (1803–1855)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

12. Nathaniel Beverly Tucker (1784–1851)

Bruton Parish Cemetery, Williamsburg, Virginia

13. William Wertenbaker (1797–1882)

University of Virginia Cemetery, Charlottesville, Virginia

14. John T.L. Preston (1811–1890)

Oak Grove Cemetery, Lexington, Virginia

15. John Collins McCabe (1810–1875)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

16. Rosalie Mackenzie Poe (1810–1874)

Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

17. John Pendleton Kennedy (1795–1870)

Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland

18. Philip Pendleton Cooke (1816–1850)

Burwell Cemetery, Millwood, Virginia

19. Amasa Converse (1795–1872)

Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, Kentucky

20. Maria Poe Clemm (1790–1871)

Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore, Maryland

21. Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (1822–1847)

Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore, Maryland

22. Hiram Haines (1802–1841)

Blandford Cemetery, Petersburg, Virginia

23. Thomas Willis White (1788–1843)

Saint John’s Episcopal Churchyard, Richmond, Virginia

24. Eliza White (1820–1888)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

25. Elizabeth Van Lew (1818–1900)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

26. William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870)

Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina

27. John M. Daniel (1825–1865)

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

28. John Reuben Thompson (1823–1873)

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

29. Susan Archer Talley Weiss (1822–1917)

Riverview Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

30. Susan V.C. Ingram (1831–1917)

Elmwood Cemetery, Norfolk, Virginia

31. Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton (1810–1888)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

32. Dr. John F. Carter (1825–1905)

Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

33. Joseph Evans Snodgrass (1813–1880)

Hedgesville Cemetery, Hedgesville, West Virginia

34. Elizabeth Rebecca Herring Tutt Smith (1815–1889)

Loudon Park Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland

35. Neilson Poe (1809–1884)

Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland

36. Zaccheus Collins Lee (1805–1859)

Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

37. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore, Maryland

Notes

Directory of Portraits

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the prior and current staff of the Poe Museum in Richmond, including Dean Knight, Debbie Tuttle Phillips, Jaime Fawcett and especially Chris Semtner, who answered questions and shared images on behalf of the museum. Thanks to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, especially David F. Gaylin, for assistance. I appreciate the support of the past and present members of Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery, including Clayton Shepherd, Jeffry Burden and Barbara Crockett Lagasse and all the cemetery staff who were willing to guide me and share invaluable records. Thanks also to Kate Jenkins with The History Press for her feedback and assistance. Without the encouragement, support and feedback from Johnathan Shipley, this project would not have been possible.

INTRODUCTION

As a teen, I was fortunate to have grown up with a father, a daily newspaper reader, who clipped news articles about various topics that he knew I would enjoy reading. These saved articles included the annual pieces on the Poe Toaster, the name the media gave to the unidentified person who visited Edgar Allan Poe’s original grave on the author’s birthday for seven decades. In these articles, reporters sometimes noted freezing temperatures and how the Poe Toaster arrived regardless of the weather. Reporters always shared that the mysterious visitor left tokens of remembrance, which included three roses and a bottle of cognac. For my eighteenth birthday, a friend brought me these same tokens the Poe Toaster left, although her parents insisted that first because I was underage the cognac bottle had to be emptied. I was enchanted by the idea of a shadowy figure visiting the poet’s cenotaph (an empty tomb) in the middle of the night every January 19.

I also feel fortunate having grown up near the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. While I cannot recall my first visit, which perhaps was a school trip, I have many fond memories of visiting the museum, attending events and volunteering as a museum guide while I was an undergraduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since that time, I have helped clean up the Enchanted Garden, shared how to make paper flowers during a gothic garden event and given lectures as a Sunday Readings speaker. One lecture, Poe and Shockoe Hill Cemetery, connected both my love for the author and for cemeteries. I based it on my annual Poe tour in Shockoe Hill Cemetery near the anniversary of the author’s death in which I highlight Poe’s connections to those interred in the cemetery. The Shockoe Hill Cemetery tour is significant because the cemetery includes his foster family as well as more friends and acquaintances of Poe than any other cemetery. It also is a place he visited both alone and with his wife.

Bust at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Author’s collection.

In 2022, I organized a meeting at my workplace for the English department and scheduled it on Poe’s birthday. I asked my colleagues to prepare to toast Poe at the end of the meeting. This led to banter with the academic dean about how Poe was a Baltimorean, which led to others noting how other cities claimed Poe. Which city or state owns Poe? The author’s reach is too great to be contained to any single place. After the workplace banter, I expanded my research focus from Shockoe Hill Cemetery to finding the connections to Poe in other cemeteries. I first started in Richmond. Then I included Baltimore, since that is where Poe is buried. While researching, I discovered so many connections to the author. Because of the nature of his career as a writer, Poe connected with numerous people. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore lists over 200 correspondents along with 420 surviving letters.¹ I also discovered that my knowledge about one of my favorite authors was somewhat narrow. I had read Poe’s poems and short stories, but I had not taken the time to read and reflect on his letters or his criticism. And other than a few of Poe’s works that I teach somewhat regularly in my courses, I had not revisited Poe’s writing for quite a while. With all of this in mind and with my research gathered, I set out to create a grand tour of cemeteries to visit many of the people Poe knew well during his life. The names I had read in biographies and museum exhibits were now the names engraved on the tombstones.

WHY CEMETERIES?

Cemeteries are ideal places for reflection. Cemeteries remove us from the distraction of our busy daily lives. They encourage us to go within, to remember and to connect. Some of my favorite family moments have been with relatives, both living and dead, in cemeteries. I have fond memories of visiting cemeteries with my maternal grandfather, a genealogist. I also remember the first time I met my late paternal grandfather in the cemetery where my father hopes to one day be buried. Even in city cemeteries, once I step onto the grounds, I am removed from the traffic and visual reminders of the city. I silence my mobile devices. This place has my complete attention. In some ways, visiting a cemetery is like traveling back in time to see what a place looked like to people decades or even centuries ago. I discover what mattered most to them and their families through epitaphs and memorials.

Cemeteries can be seen as liminal spaces—in-between spaces not exclusively for the dead or for the living. Deriving from the Latin root limen meaning threshold, liminal spaces are usually transitional and changing. Burial spaces that were once in the heart of the community were later pushed toward the outskirts of town only to again be swallowed up by urban expansion, and now many of them function as green spaces with a new range of contemporary uses [as] their principal users are no longer [only] mourners and the bereaved.² A focus on cemetery tourism has increased in recent years with Loren Rhoads’s 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Greg Melville’s Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries. In 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic, historical cemeteries with acreage to spare regained visitor attention. While indoor attractions closed to help slow the spread of the virus, cemeteries across the nation reported an increase in visitors.

Yet cemetery tourism is not a new trend. For centuries, pilgrimages have been made to burial grounds. During the Victorian era, the rise in garden cemeteries, considered our country’s first public parks, offered visitors a place for respite and recreation. Poe visited cemeteries and churchyards before many of the garden cemeteries were established. He took strolls with his wife, courted women and visited and mourned late friends and loved ones.

Numerous cemeteries across the United States offer tours that make connections to some of Poe’s strange tales, including Evergreen Cemetery’s Beyond the Grave: Cemetery Wanderings with Edgar Allan Poe in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Riverview Cemetery’s Poe Walk: Morbid Curiosities in Trenton, New Jersey; Spirits of The Woodlands: Haunted Cemetery Tours in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; The Poe Tour in Charleston, South Carolina; and Mount Auburn’s Edgar Allan Poe Cemetery Tour in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are tours such as the Original Poe Grave Ghost Walk that includes a stop by Westminster Burying Ground in Baltimore, St. John’s Church’s Fancy Me Mad—Tales from Edgar Allan Poe and Graveyard Tours and the Shockoe Hill Cemetery tour that I give in Richmond, Virginia, that share Poe’s connections to those interred in the burying grounds.

Shockoe Hill Cemetery. Author’s collection.

Some of the cemeteries that I visited were places Poe visited. For some of the cemeteries in this collection, Poe would recognize only the names on the graves, not the place itself. And for other cemeteries, Poe would recognize the names and be familiar with the land—although prior to it being established as a burial ground. I love the idea of standing where the author once stood and walking the paths he once walked. I enjoy physically being in a place associated with history—where authors walked and lived. After all, this is why historic walking tours are so popular. We want to be where history took place. There is nothing inherently unique about visiting the homes or graves of individuals whose work was admired during their lifetimes. Bibliophiles make excursions to the graves of their favorite writers. There is something unique about visiting the graves of those who were one degree of separation away from an author; although in life, people share how they may have met a friend or family member of someone famous. I wanted to meet the people Poe knew when he was alive. To do this, I conducted research and made several road trips to cemeteries.

WHY SOUTHERN CEMETERIES?

Poe was born in Boston but considered himself a Virginian, a southerner. He lived in the South most of his life and died in Baltimore while on his way to take a trip up North with plans of returning home to Richmond. Poe is credited for originating the modern detective story, developing gothic horror tales and writing the precursor of science fiction, but he worked to elevate southern literature and have it recognized. Focusing on cemeteries mostly in Virginia and Maryland, along with Washington, D.C.; Kentucky; South Carolina; and West Virginia helped me have a fuller understanding of Poe’s life and the people with whom he worked, socialized, loved and even at times loathed. These were individuals who supported, inspired and challenged him. There are even a few who attempted to foil his plans.

There are several guides that focus on the houses and buildings connected to Edgar Allan Poe and those that focus on the artifacts connected to the famous author. There are also books that grapple with how the author’s life and residences influenced his work. This is a book about the people who once touched the life of the author we adore. I call myself a Poe enthusiast although I have tried to accurately represent the history and the individuals in this collection. While reading his letters in which he bemoaned his situation in society and begged friends and family for money was at times daunting, I still appreciate what he was trying to do for himself and future generations—earn a living by being a writer and editor. It was a near impossible quest; arguably, it still is for many. This book includes a collection of thirty-seven memorials, nineteen cemeteries and five states, plus Washington, D.C. To have a fuller story of Poe and the people with whom he associated, I went to cemeteries and visited graves of his mother, wife, foster family, first and last fiancée, bosses, friends, cousins, school peers and instructors. I hope that this guide encourages readers of Poe to visit the cemeteries in the collection to create their own experiences with those connected to Poe.

Included in this book is a list of the cemeteries along with a brief history for each. For each personal connection, I note the cemetery and burial location and share an overview of their relationship to Poe. It is often too easy for some to walk through a cemetery admiring the memorials and epitaphs while completely forgetting that these were people with their own interests and stories. In a section called Life Before the Stone, I share a brief biography for those included in this book. I have included a description of the grave and a section called Grave Reflections, which includes recollections of my experience visiting the site or stories of documented visits. For cemeteries that include more than one Poe connection, readers will find a chart listing those interred in the cemetery.

Burwell Cemetery. Author’s collection.

THE CEMETERIES

There are nineteen cemeteries represented that are accessible to